Outpost of the new Cold War.

As I start to buckle up for the ride from the airport into Tbilisi, my friends look at me in disbelief and derision. Nobody, but nobody, uses a seat belt here. "It's for decoration," I'm told. Welcome to Georgia, enjoy the ride.

The streets here have not been paved since the time of the Soviet Union. Driving is all about avoiding enormous potholes, even if this means heading down the opposite side of the road against oncoming traffic. In any case, there are no white lines dividing the road, and traffic lights are a game. Maybe once there were rules here; now it's just a question of going headfirst, come what may.

This is a country whose infrastructure has all but disappeared since its independence from the Soviet Union twelve years ago. In that time, there have been three mini-"revolutions" and a civil war. Unlike the post-communist success stories in the Baltics, Georgia is an economic and social basket case, a country no one seems to want. The European Union, happy to embrace other tiny ex-Soviet republics, has virtually ignored this one. There is a "special" European envoy here. This is to avoid having a "normal" representative, Regis Gente, editor of a French newspaper in Tbilisi, La Vie en Georgie, tells me.

And yet this no man's land stands in the middle of a post-Cold War power struggle between Russia and the United States, which has implications for the economic and political stability of the entire trans-Caucasian region, as well as for the Bush Administration's war on terrorism. For years, ex-President Edouard Shevardnadze played both sides of the fence, happily accepting more than $1 billion in American aid--only second per capita behind the state of Israel--while keeping his Russian options open. His departure during November's revolution of roses changes the equation. His successor, Columbia University educated Mikhail Saakashvili, is decidedly pro-Western.

Just weeks before the contested elections on November 2, several U.S. VIPs like John McCain, John Shalikashvili, Strobe Talbott, and James Baker (whose law firm, Baker Botts, was hired by BP to lobby for its oil interests in Georgia) arrived in Tbilisi underlining the need for fair elections and bringing a plan for reforming the Georgian electoral system. Shevardnadze fixed the elections, and during the ensuing crisis, U.S. Ambassador Richard Miles went back and forth between the contestants, apparently trying to broker a compromise. Miles was also U.S. chief of mission to Yugoslavia shortly before the Milosevic overthrow in Belgrade. The corruption of the government here had obviously become an embarrassment for the U.S. Administration. Just before the elections, a member of the outgoing parliament told me this aid was cut off and redirected to NGOs throughout the country. Many of these organizations protested against Shevardnadze, who resigned on November 23.

Georgia is a key player in the current U.S-Russian standoff. Situated on the main transit route to carry the rich Caspian Sea oil and gas reserves from Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan to Turkey and onward to the West, Georgia is a way to bypass the Middle East to the south and Russia to the north. A new pipeline is scheduled to bring one million barrels of oil to a port in Turkey by 2005. In 2007, a new line will bring gas. This enormous output needs a stable regime in power in Tbilisi and, considering the substantial transit fees, one relatively free of corruption. It is a measure of this project's importance that during the election crisis, the U.S. European command in Stuttgart considered deploying troops to guard the pipeline under construction, according to Newsweek.

Washington was pleased to see Shevardnadze go. When, last year, he sold a U.S.-run electric company to the Russians and turned Georgian gas over to the Russian Gazprom, Stephen Mann, U.S. envoy for this region, came visiting and warned the Georgian leader "not to undercut the powerful promise of an East-West energy corridor," adding a Biblical reference: "One man cannot be a servant of two masters." It is unstated but clear U.S. policy to free Georgia from the Russian yoke, both economically and militarily. On a recent trip to Georgia to study the possibility of a mobile U.S. base here, Donald Rumsfeld asked the Russians to honor the 1999 Istanbul Accords calling for the withdrawal of some 3,300 Russian troops still in Georgia.

The Georgia Train and Equip Program, already in its second year, has placed between 100 and 200 U.S. military advisers in the country. They

are training 2,000 Georgian border guards in anti-terrorist techniques, a program which is unique among the ex-Soviet republics. A recent law permits these U.S. soldiers to carry arms on Georgian territory. This $64 million program is officially meant to deal with the extremely unstable situation in the porous Pankisi Gorge, the mountainous part of northern Georgia bordering Chechnya. This region has long been a sale haven for rebel forces fighting against Russian authority, but there have been rumors of Al Qaeda operatives moving in the area. The Georgian Interior Ministry claims there are Arabs fighting alongside the Islamic Chechens. If this were true, the trans-Caucasian pipeline might eventually become a primary terrorist target. "Georgia is the key to controlling the Caucasus," says Irakli Managadze, chairman of the National Bank of Georgia. And on the Caucasian frontiers: Iran, Afghanistan.

The Georgian army is a chief concern for U.S. strategy here. Although it did not intervene in the "revolution of roses" in November, it is considered to be highly unstable. According to Regis Gente, "The army is so corrupt, so poor, so ill-equipped, you could buy yourself a coup d'etat for a handful of dollars."

I'm sitting in the Gori office of Paata Chkhaidze, mayor of this small town whose only claim to fame is the birth, some 125 years ago, of Josef Djugashvili, better known as Stalin. Chkhaidzc is typical of the new generation of Georgian politicians: Western educated, English speaking, fervently anti-communist. His grandfather was shot by the Bolsheviks in the 1920s. Aside from overseeing the Stalin patrimony, he doubles as Georgia's official translator of William Faulkner. He laughs when I ask him if dm United States has a big financial interest in Georgia. "There is no climate for investment here. They come, take one look at the corruption, and head back home," he says. There are also almost no serious energy reserves here, and the only real resource is first-rate natural spring water.

As I sit with Chkhaidze in his office during one of the normal everyday power failures, we talk about the lack of heating and the general breakdown of basic services. Outside the window, a monumental statue of Stalin looms over us and, in some ways, this malaise can be traced back to him. The system he set in place here is one that underpins the reliance on a strong central authority. In the time of the Soviet Union, this authority more or less functioned; for the last twelve years it has not. Georgia's growth rate last year was 8 percent, yet it remains one of Europe's poorest countries, not only because of high-level corruption but also because the fiscal authorities are simply unable to collect taxes. The government is unable to pay salaries of old-age pensions. At the state-run radio, I pass a line of about seventy people waiting in their coats in front of a small, dosed window. It is explained to me by my interpreter, who works there, that this is the day people are "supposed" to receive their salaries, that they are always (if at all) paid only in cash (you have to be extremely optimistic to have a bank account in Georgia), and there is never enough cash to go around. Those people in line had been there for forty-eight hours, sleeping on the floor, on the off chance they might receive their paltry wages. Poverty? Not only. This is a total collapse of basic infrastructure.

"I have been mayor here for over a year," says Chkhaidze, "but I have no rights, no budget, and no responsibilities. The central government offices are in the same building, and they do everything to prevent any effort at local self-government." Part of the U.S. aid money has been for developing nongovernmental agencies and ways of circumventing the central bureaucracy. It's no wonder, in this context, that some Georgians look to the American model as a ray of light in this obscurity. Chkhaidze's analysis is steeped in a familiar neoliberalism: "We don't need to make revolutions, we need to work hard, as the Germans did after World War II," he says. "The greatest tragedy of the Georgian people is that they are waiting for the government to make jobs and give them money. They are not accustomed to creating working situations themselves."

Most Georgians I talk to seem unworried about the American connection or the fact that they are being used in a continuing Cold War standoff. For them, the hatred of Russia goes deep, and they are willing to give Washington the benefit of the doubt. They believe that Moscow still has colonial designs on their country (Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the Russian far-right leader, declares this openly), and they see the United States as a buffer. Zurab Kandelaki of Radio Georgia tells me quite openly: "The Russians tried to prevent me from speaking my own language. The Americans would never do that."

"The United States is training Georgian troops. We prefer it that way," says Chkhaidze, rather than have Russian troops here.

During the recent uprising, all the major opposition leaders went overboard to express a desire to connect with the United States. For them, there is no chance of modernizing their country or escaping massive bureaucratic corruption by remaining under the Russian wing. They want U.S. funding and tutelage. I ask my friends if they think there will be a bill to pay one day, and they naively respond by saying America is geographically too far from Georgia to exact a price. On the other hand, banker Managadze confides that he is "worried about globalization. It will be a challenge for us to keep our cultural heritage." He generously receives me in his palatial central bank offices, a total stranger, willing to talk as long as I like to listen. Georgians are hungry for the contact they have so long been denied under the old system. Georgians are also ferociously nationalistic and react with caution to outside influences. And it's true, unlike in other ex-Soviet bloc countries I've been to, that the signs of Americanization, so far, are few.

When Americanization comes--as seems inevitable--it will have a long climb. Businesses here mostly pay bribes instead of taxes. All the latest electronic gear will look worthless in a situation of endless daily power cuts, and few Western companies will set up shop in unheated offices of face the utterly degrading public toilet situation here.

At a small university in the Caucasus mountain range, I am asked to give a lecture to students who study all winter long in overcoats and woolen caps because the funding for heating at the university has simply disappeared. The state-run radio and television building is still bullet-holed from the uprising of the early 1990s (in which troops fired on and killed hundreds of protesters), and the inside, where news and culture are generated, is like a slum. When I ask my friends about all this, they shrug and say: This is the result of living so long under a Soviet system. Yes, but what now? Shrug.

But maybe things will change.

In the early morning after the revolution of roses, there was "no trace of this event in front of Parliament Square," says Regis Gente. "The place was cleaned, the hedges were cut back, order was totally restored. Very un-Georgian." This was the sign the new pro-U.S, leaders wanted to give: back to (or on to) business. But, says Irakli Managadze, "it shouldn't be taken for granted that the situation will change quickly." No need to fasten seat belts just yet.

David Zane Mairowitz is writing a book and making a documentary film about Stalin's legacy in contemporary Georgia.